All I knew about the 1961 movie The Misfits is that Clark Gable dies at the end. Literally. It was his last movie. He died a week after filming ended, because, some say, he insisted at the age of 59 on doing his own stunts, which included being dragged by wild horses.

The Misfits was also Marilyn Monroe's last movie, although it took her another year and a half to die in an appalling Anna Nicole Smith public way. The Misfits also featured a haunting performance by Montgomery Clift, another Hollywood star destined for premature burial a few years later at the age of 45. In its own way The Misfits was about losers and I watched it for the first time on Channel 12 early yesterday morning on the day that the Phillies would either sweep the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, or lose for the ten thousandth time.

Misfits. Haven't Phillies fans always been misfits in a world of Yankee-loving front runners. Cardinals fans could wear a World Series championship ring on every finger of both hands. Yankee fans would have to take off their shoes and socks and still have six championhship rings left over.

Phillies fans have exactly one and on that ring we swore to love the Phillies all the days of our lives. Phillies fans didn't take a wedding vow so much as an oath of poverty, chastity and obedience. As I watched The Misfits I started keeping track of dialogue that applied to Phillies fans. "I can't make a landing and I can't get up to God," Clark Gable says at one point. Earlier, speaking of cowboys, but who could have been wearing red pinstripes, Gable says, "We're all good for nothing. But it's better than wages."

Thelma Ritter says, "The slogan here is 'Anything Goes. . .Just Don't Complain When It Went." About nervous people, Eli Wallach says, "If it wasn't for the nervous people in the world, we'd all be eating each other." During a rodeo, when told what makes a bucking bronco buck (a belt that "holds them where they don't like it") Marilyn Monroe says, "It isn't fair." To which Wallach replies, "You wouldn't have a rodeo, otherwise."

Perhaps imagining pre-season predictions, Monroe says, "Maybe you shouldn't believe what people say. It's unfair to them." Perhaps referring to a Charlie Manual post game press conference, Gable says, "Did you ever get to know a man better by asking him questions?" Speaking, no doubt, of the inconsolable nature of Phillies fans, Monroe says, "You could blow up the world and all you'd feel is sorry for yourself."

Who knew The Misfits was a baseball movie?